Reunion at Japanese Port Marks Pearl Harbor Attack : Observance: Veterans gather at launching site for Dec. 7 strike to recall exploits, defend their cause.

In the summer of 1941, just days after heavy typhoon winds had battered this port on the island of Kyushu, a large fleet of battleships, aircraft carriers and their escorts steamed into the bay. The quiet castle town was suddenly bustling with sailors. The skies were filled with elegant planes that had not been seen here before--the Zero fighter.

In November the fleet, joined by ships from nearby ports, set off on its secret mission--to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Now, 50 years later, this little town is remembering Pearl Harbor as a glorious period in its history. Late last month, a Saiki youth group staged a weekend of events including a symposium, exhibit, dinner and a military-sponsored harbor tour to showcase “Saiki’s role in world history.”

The son of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the navy commander in chief who planned and executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, was there to join the celebration, and young people listened eagerly to stories from surviving Zero pilots and submarine captains.

“We think Saiki played an important role in history and should be remembered,” said Koji Sago, head of the young people’s group that organized the events.

The keynote speaker at the symposium was Kennosuke Torisu, who was in charge of the navy’s “human torpedo” program, which put volunteers in single-man submarines tipped with explosives. Torisu told an audience of about 400 how the Japanese navy resisted kamikaze-style suicide tactics until the last days of the war.

“As our war efforts turned for the worse, we decided it was the only way for us to sink (American) aircraft carriers,” said Torisu, who is now a respected naval historian.

Torisu recalled warmly how villagers on little boats would paddle out to the submarines moored in the bay to sell vegetables to the sailors.

The Pearl Harbor operation was not without difficulties. A new torpedo just developed by Mitsubishi for use in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor had to be rushed onto the carriers direct from the factories shortly before the fleet departed, recalled Eiichi Choh, a former navy captain.

At the symposium here, the audience’s greatest applause was reserved for Kyozo Makino, a Zero pilot turned hotel manager, who stridently insisted that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in self-defense and that its cause was just. “Before the war, only four countries in Asia had independence; after the war they were all independent,” Makino said. “That’s because Japan pushed the whites out of Asia.”

America helped Japan rebuild after the war only because “it recognized that the true enemy was communism, and it felt bad about having gone to war with Japan,” said Makino, who is now chairman of the Japan-America Society in the neighboring town of Beppu. “We must teach our youngsters that we were not the aggressors in the war.”

Outside the lecture hall, the Saiki youths had set up an exhibit of war memorabilia that included a large mock-up of Saiki’s bay and airfield packed with model ships, submarines and airplanes.

The town was chosen as the jump-off point because it was secluded, it had both an air and naval base and its hilly terrain resembled the area around Pearl Harbor and was perfect for training the pilots.

On the walls were large photographs of American ships being blown up and clips of Honolulu newspapers announcing the Pearl Harbor attack in enormous headlines. A display cabinet contained a knife that belonged to Yamamoto as well as a sample of his calligraphy. Outside were the burnt remains of an engine from a downed American plane that had been salvaged from Saiki’s bay.

Kazuo Kubota, a wartime airplane mechanic, passed his hands almost lovingly over the American engine.

“When I saw the way America kept coming up with new-model airplane engines like this throughout the war while we kept using the same old Zero fighters, I knew we had lost the war,” Kubota said. “The American airplane technology was astounding.”

In the evening, participants retired to a luxurious Japanese restaurant housed in what was once a nobleman’s home, which had been frequented by senior navy officers while the fleet was training at Saiki.

Choh, the navy captain, gave a tour of the old building, pointing out the small tatami room where Adm. Yamamoto himself used to relax, resting his back against a particular wooden post on the far side of the room. “Was he as dashing a man as he is pictured in the movies?” a visitor asked. “He was really pretty short,” the admiral’s son responded.

“He was like a god,” Choh interjected. “He was Japan’s hope.”

After dinner, several young men gathered on the tatami mat around Yuji Akamatsu, a pilot who flew in the first wave of attacks on Pearl Harbor. “Let’s talk about the war,” said Yutaki Kawano, 34, president of the Saiki Junior Chamber of Commerce, as he filled Akamatsu’s sake cup.

“It was really no big deal,” said a relaxed and smiling Akamatsu, who now runs a family fish paste business. “Enemy fire in those days was so inaccurate, it wasn’t that dangerous--nothing like the high-tech stuff in the Gulf War.”

The only scary part, said the pilot, was “coming over the mountain, flying so close to the ground that the trees swayed from the turbulence created by the plane’s propeller. We got so close to the ship, there was really no chance of missing.” He could see people running for cover. One thing he had to remember to do, he said, was to take pictures of the ship exploding. “If you didn’t have a picture, it didn’t count as a hit.”

Later, at a small bar, two of the young men spoke longingly of the dedicated lives of the veterans.

“Think of the (kamikaze pilots),” said Sago, head of the young people’s group. “They knew they were going to die, and they would write these wills permitting their wives to remarry. We want to try to understand the purity of the feeling in their hearts toward their country.”

If he were to suddenly find himself in wartime Japan, Kawano said, he would fight as wholeheartedly for his country as had that earlier generation, even though he has not received the same indoctrination. “We young people today still have in our hearts that feeling of bushido (samurai spirit),” he said. “In England the male ideal is the gentleman, in America it is the dandy, in Japan it is bushido .”

Sago, noting that the 21st anniversary of novelist Yukio Mishima’s ritual suicide was Nov. 25, said, “You have to respect men like that who set goals and risk their lives for it.”

Sago sympathized with Mishima’s goal of changing Japan’s peace constitution to allow the creation of a more effective military. “We have a military that can’t do anything,” he said.

The next day, a bright Sunday, two gunboats from the local naval base took Saiki families on a tour of the harbor. While children played with disarmed guns mounted on the deck, the captain pointed out spots where warships were anchored before leaving for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Later, in private, the captain of one of the ships described the dangerous training that pilots had to undergo in preparation for the Dec. 7 attack. An old submarine was docked, and pilots practiced flying over a hill, then swooping down low and within 800 yards of the target before swerving off sharply. “They even trained at night, so there were a lot of accidents,” he said.

An 81-year-old war veteran was one of the few at the reunion who seemed to remember the cruel realities of that time. “During the war, the ocean was a frightening place--the planes, the submarines,” he said aboard one of the gunboats. “Now to be on this ship like this, it’s so peaceful.”